How I Use Safari Tab Groups to Stop Drowning in Tabs

Stop rebuilding the same twelve tabs every morning. Let Safari hold them for you.

Wes Brennan ·Jun 4, 2026·8 min read

There are two kinds of Safari users in this world. The first keeps a tidy window with four or five tabs, closes things when they are done, and sleeps soundly at night.

The rest of us open a tab for one quick search, then another, then seventeen more, until the titles shrink down to tiny illegible slivers and we are scared to close the window in case we lose something important.

I was deep in the second group for a long time. My Safari window looked like a ransom note. I would have flight prices, a recipe, three articles I meant to read, a half finished work thing, and a tab I genuinely could not identify, all crammed into one strip.

Honestly, the worst part was the fear. I never closed that window because I was sure the moment I did, I would need one of those tabs again.

Tab Groups fixed that for me, and they are the kind of feature you feel a little silly for ignoring once you start using them. Don't worry, you don't need to be a power user. Setting one up takes about twenty seconds, and after a week you will wonder how you lived in that single overstuffed window for so long.

What Tab Groups actually do

Here is the deal. A Tab Group is a saved set of tabs that lives in the Safari sidebar. Instead of one window holding everything you have ever opened, you keep a separate bundle of tabs for each thing you are working on.

One group for a trip you are planning.
One for a project at work.
One for whatever rabbit hole you are currently down.

The magic is that the group stays put. You can switch from your "Kitchen Reno" group to your "Work Stuff" group and the tabs from one do not bleed into the other.

When you come back tomorrow, your group is exactly how you left it. You are not rebuilding the same set of pages every morning. Safari just holds them.

I think of Tab Groups as the in between tool.

Bookmarks are for stuff I want to keep forever. Reading List is for articles I will get to eventually. Tab Groups are for the pages I am actively working with right now, the ones I still need to compare, check, or come back to before the project is done.

Step 1: Make your first group

Open the sidebar first. Click the Sidebar button in the top left of Safari, or use Shift + Command + L if you like keyboard shortcuts.

If your window is already a disaster, the fastest move is to scoop up everything you have open into a group in one shot.

Click the Sidebar button, then choose New Tab Group With Tabs. Every tab in that window gets bundled together and your window suddenly looks calm. It feels great. Try it once just for the relief.

If you want to start clean instead, click the Sidebar button and choose New Empty Tab Group, then start opening pages inside it.

Either way, the most important thing you can do next is give the group a real name. This is where people get lazy and then wonder why Tab Groups never clicked for them.

A group called "Research" tells you nothing in three weeks. A group called "Italy Trip," "iPhone Upgrade," or "Q3 Report Sources" tells you exactly what it is the second you glance at it.

Name it like you will have forgotten everything about it by Friday, because you will have.

Step 2: Sort your existing mess into groups

You do not have to do this all at once. I built mine over a couple of days, just moving tabs as I noticed they belonged together.

To move a tab into a group, Right-click the tab, choose Move to Tab Group, and pick the group you want.

You can also just drag a tab from the tab bar straight into a group in the sidebar, which is how I do it most of the time because it feels more natural.

Personally, I take this to the extreme. I keep a group for almost everything that lasts more than an afternoon.

A group while I am shopping for something, a group for a piece I am writing, a group for the slow burn home project I keep meaning to finish. When the thing is over, the group goes away. More on that in a second.

One tip. Keep your groups focused. If a group gets so big the tabs are tiny again, that is your sign to split it. A giant "Apple Stuff" group is useless. Break it into "Mac Buying," "HomeKit," and "iCloud Storage" and each one stays usable.

Step 3: Let iCloud carry your groups between devices

This is the part that turned Tab Groups from a nice Mac feature into something I actually rely on.

If you turn on Safari syncing, your Tab Groups follow you to your iPhone and iPad. I do my heavy organizing on the Mac, where the sidebar has room to breathe and dragging tabs around is easy, then I read and check things on my phone later from the couch. Same group, no sending links to myself.

To switch syncing on, go to System Settings > Apple Account > iCloud > Safari on your Mac and make sure it is On. On your iPhone or iPad, it is Settings > Apple Account > iCloud > Safari. As long as every device is signed into the same Apple Account, your groups show up everywhere.

Trust me on this one. Doing the messy organizing on the Mac and the casual reading on the phone is the right division of labor. The Mac is built for wrangling, the phone is built for catching up.

Step 4: Share a group when more than one person is collecting links

If you have ever tried to plan something with another person over text, you know the pain. A chain of forty links nobody can find later. Shared Tab Groups solve that.

To share one, open the Sidebar, hold your pointer over the Tab Group, click the More button, then choose Share Tab Group.

It works through Messages, and everyone you invite can add and remove tabs and see the group update as it changes.

We used one for a family trip and it was the first time planning something together did not turn into link soup.

One word of caution. Anyone in a shared group can change it, and a shared group quietly shows the other people what you are all looking at. For anything private, keep it in your own personal group. Sharing is for the group project, not the surprise party research.

Step 5: Clean up when the project is done

Look, I'm not saying you should hoard groups forever. The whole point is that they serve a project while it is alive, then get out of the way.

When something wraps up, I do a quick pass. Anything worth keeping for the long haul gets a real bookmark. Articles I still want to read go to Reading List. Notes and quotes go into Notes or Pages. Then I delete the group so it is not sitting there as clutter.

To delete a group, open the Sidebar, Right-click the Tab Group, and choose Delete. If a group has been sitting untouched for months and is not tied to anything you are still doing, that is your cue. Let it go.

My simple Safari system

You do not need anything complicated here. One group per project. Name it clearly. Drag your tabs in as you find them. Turn on iCloud syncing so the groups follow you to your phone. Share a group when someone else is helping collect links and when the project is done, save the few things worth keeping and delete the rest.

That is it.

I ignored Tab Groups for an embarrassingly long time, mostly because my one giant window felt normal. It was not normal. It was a junk drawer I was afraid to clean.

Now Safari feels less like a pile of tabs I am scared to touch and more like a set of little workspaces I can open and close on purpose.

For a guy who used to run thirty tabs deep, that still feels like a small miracle.

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