I find this reduces cognitive switching penalty.<p>Each window has all the tabs relating to a specific task.<p>When you finish a task, you can close the whole window at once.<p>When you want to pause a task, you can minimise the window.<p>Your minimised windows show you of your tasks in progress without you having to infer it be checking all of your tabs.<p>Building the habit is hard, so what I did was install a browser extension that limits the number of tabs you have running, and set the limit to three. This will force you to start using new windows for different tasks. It can be annoying in the long term, but it's enough to break the "new-tab-by-default" habit.
I use multiple browsers for this purpose - trying to keep individual <i>windows</i> straight that are all holding [supposedly] grouped <i>tabs</i> sounds like about 20x the mental overhead
That’s been one of the strategies to help me cope with my ADD: turning my most visited services into standalone apps, and forbid to open links outside the domain in those apps.<p>I use Fluid in Mac, although IIRC there was a non trivial way to create them using Firefox.
Even better is to use a single workspace for each task. I keep an IDE window, a few terminals, and a couple browsers for each task I'm working on. Not sure if this works in floating WMs, but in a tiling WM it's a delight. I actually disabled tabs in Firefox and let Sway do tabbing instead. That way I can have a single window tabbed with multiple apps, only some of them a browser.<p>Before I started working this way, my stress levels were through the roof. I spent so much time alt-tabbing through 100 windows and getting burned out. Organization is key!
I'm uaing this methodology. The only issue is whence I have 4 Chrome windows I cannot tell which one is which. I hope it can show group name instead of tab name.
I don't like doing this on a Mac because the windows seem to disappear when in background. Windows is incredibly good for well, multiple windows. It snaps to corners and halves, swaps contexts, handles multiple monitors well. A Mac is a better focused work machine, but sometimes I just forego the multi tasking.
If I could do that with everything I would.<p>Windows needs window containers in which house windowed "desktops" that house programs.<p>I want to put a project on pause I can just close the container and pick up with everything in it later instead of trying to document and remember where and what I was using and opening everything the same way every time
There's still the annoyance of wanting to hang on to some tabs, but not others. Bookmarking extensions are typically the answer, but there seems to be a problem with out-of-sight, out-of-mind. So once you've bookmarked a tab and closed it, the chance of going back to it isn't good.
If you use Chrome I recommend the tab group feature. I group all of my relevant tabs into a group and close out the entire group when I'm done with that task/project (or sometimes never, but at least things are organized).<p>But I wholeheartedly agree with OPs idea in concept.
That’s how I arrange things. I have enough screen space to visibly see all of the windows. I avoid tabs, mdi, workspaces, containers and other such groupings and stick to separate windows.
I really wish Eclipse or IntelliJ had windowing like Pixelmator. I'd love to split everything up over multiple screens and take advantage of multi-monitor setup on my Intel mac.
There's such a big overlap between most tasks though. The tab paradigm is fine for casuals, but think grouping, tagging, and sorting needs a lot of work.