Here’s another approach for capping tab insanity: Separate Tabs is a Firefox extension developed by Shuang, that groups tabs with pages in the same web domain. For example if you have several Wikipedia articles opened, they will all be kept together no matter what order you open them. Additionally, it adds a group separator with a close button that against intuition doesn’t close the group but the separator itself.

Separate Tabs groups tabs based on the full server name which can be a good or a bad thing depeding on your browsing habits. For example, several mozilla.org sites (like ftp.m.o, labs.m.o or bugzilla.m.o) are not grouped because the server names are not exactly the same, which may be inconvenient. At the same time, if you are visiting WordPress.com, each blog you open will belong to a different group saving you from tab spaghetti.

I find the tab separator too wide and the close group button is hidden when tabs become to small so it is not always available. Together with the fact that there’s no way of customizing it without a hack, I find it obtrusive. I’d prefer a thinner separator with a color that better blends with Winstripe 2, Firefox’s default theme.

I’d also like to see some grouping in the List Tabs menu, maybe with different background colors or indenting which would be easier for people with disabilities.

Cosmetics aside, this is a clever extension that can definitely help the sometimes painful task of locating that tab.

Get it at Mozilla Add-ons.

Usefulness: 4/5 – Usability: 4/5 – Features: 3/5

EDIT: Shuang has updated the extension name to Separate Tabs. I updated the post accordingly.