Don’t you find tab management stressful and time-consuming? In day-to-day browsing, you have to keep the number of tabs from going out of control, know how to search for tabs when needed, monitor memory usage, and avoid closing the wrong tab in a hurry.

If you’re a tab hoarder, the Firefox browser has built-in features and smart extensions that can take over the bulk of tab management for you. Let’s explore some useful ways to manage multiple tabs in Firefox.

1. Open Multiple Tabs in Firefox Startup Homepage

If you can’t decide which website to set up as your home page, don’t stress about it. You can program Firefox to open a bunch of web pages simultaneously every time you click on the Home button or when you launch Firefox.

Open up the web pages you want to launch. Navigate to Firefox > Preferences, and click the Home panel. Just to the right of Homepage and new windows section, choose Custom URLs from the dropdown menu. Then, click Use Current Pages. You’ll see the links of currently opened tabs appear in the Homepage field, which means that you’re all set.

open same set of tabs on launching firefox

Restore Tabs from Previous Session

When you reopen your browser, Firefox loads the home page by default. You can set it to load your previously open tabs instead. Head to Firefox > Preferences and click the General panel. Just below Startup, select Restore previous session.

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At times, you may lose windows and tabs under the circumstances like Firefox update, accidental loss of power, hangs, and crash. This setting will ensure that you don’t lose precious tabs.

Pin Tabs and Other Options

Right-click a tab and choose Pin Tab from the context menu to pin your important sites when you relaunch Firefox. You’ll find other useful tab options, like Mute Tab, Close Tabs to the Left/Right, Send tab to device, and more in the same context menu.

various tab options in firefox

Reopen Closed Tabs

To reopen recently closed tabs, press Ctrl + Shift + T on Windows or Cmd + Shift + T on Mac. If you prefer to use the mouse, right-click on any tab in the window and select Reopen Closed Tab.

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If you want to restore one or more tabs from the recently closed ones, you’ll find them under Application Menu > History > Recently Closed Tabs.

access-recently-closed-tabs-in-firefox

Bookmark Tabs for Later

At times, you might need to shut down your computer for various reasons. If you don’t want to lose your tabs, you can bookmark all tabs for later. To do this, right-click on any tab and choose Select All Tabs (or press Ctrl + A to select your tabs).

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Press Ctrl + Shift + D to open the bookmark dialog box. In here, type in the name, select the folder (go with Bookmarks Toolbar for easy access) where you want to store the bookmarks, and click Save.

set the location of bookmarked tabs, preferably bookmarks toolbar

2. Group Firefox Tabs with Simple Tab Groups

Simple Tab Groups is a simple add-on to organize your tabs. To get started, click the extension icon located in the browser’s toolbar. Click Create new group, type in the group name, and click OK.

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As you browse, you can start organizing your tabs instantly. Right-click on any tab, then choose Move tab to group.

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This adds the tab to the created group and hides it from the view. If you have multiple groups, choose a group of your choice. In my case, I have made four groups: Main, Inbox, Research, and Action. As you click a group, it’ll load all the tabs, and the window will jump to the foreground.

Once you have some groups, you can easily manage them. Right-click on a group name to view its context menu. You’ll see options to open the group in a new window, sort groups, export group to bookmarks, or archive them. Select Group Settings to rename a group or change its icon style. It even supports regular expressions for capturing tabs from the same domain.

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The Manage Groups option opens a new tab with a speed-dial like view of each tab group. In here, you can move tabs to a different group, tweak group settings, and organize groups in any order you prefer.

manage groups in simple tab groups

The extension is pre-configured for use with the Firefox container. The tabs in a group will sync to another device through STG bookmarks saved in the toolbar.

3. Isolate Your Browsing Activity With Firefox Containers

Multi-Account Containers is an extension designed to help you reduce your digital footprint. On principle, it uses “containers” to separate your browsing activity for multiple profiles. Your login session, site preferences, and tracking data will get confined to a container. Each container has a custom label, color-coded, to help you identify the tab.

If you use Firefox on multiple devices, the container configuration and site assignments get synced between computers. There are many use cases for containers in day-to-day browsing. You can log in to different accounts on the same website ( for example, Gmail) without using private windows or other browsers.

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Or, imagine that you’re shopping on Amazon and start seeing ads related to that product. With containers, you can browse shopping websites freely without worrying about tracking. Here’s a complete guide on how to setup and use Firefox container.

4. Save Memory with OneTab

Closing tabs free up memory, but closing and re-opening the same page in tabs now and then is a pain. OneTab is a helpful extension that preserves your browsing session and frees up RAM as well.

save-memory-with-onetab

When you click the OneTab button, it bundles all your existing tabs into a list. To access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or at all once. Apart from this, you can export or import your tabs as a list of URLs, or drag-and-drop tabs in the OneTab list to rearrange them.

5. Move Multiple Tabs Into a New Window

If you open a bunch of links in tabs only to realize that you can group them all in a new window, then the Detach Tabs extension allows you to move multiple tabs into a new window at once.

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Right-click the tab and choose Detach Tab to move the current tab and to its right, all tabs from the same origin, or tabs from a particular source across all windows to a new window. It saves time, prevents clutter, and lets you focus on a task.

6. Export Tabs URLs

At times you’re researching a topic and may wish to keep a record of links in your note-taking app. The Export Tabs URLs extension lists the URLs of all the open tabs and lets you Copy it to the clipboard or export it as a .TXT file.

export-tab-URLs-firefox

Check Include Titles to append the title of the tab, limit the export to current windows, ignore pinned tabs, or add parameters to filter tabs. You can even define a custom format instead of the default included title with any combination of characters and special blocks.

7. Archive Web Pages from Multiple Tabs With One Click

Having an archive of the web page saved on your computer can help you in case the link goes missing or dead. While there are many specialized bookmarking apps to save links they might come with a yearly subscription fee.

SingleFile is a useful extension that lets you save an entire web page, including its images, styles, frames, font, and more, as a single HTML file. If you want to save a web page from multiple tabs, right-click the extension button and choose Save Tabs > Save selected or all tabs.

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There are many useful options to tweak. You can customize the file name as per the template, remove unused HTML elements, CSS style, iframes, and scripts. Check Save deferred images to save images without scrolling the page or upload the HTML file to Google Drive.

Stress Free Tab Management

We’re drowning in browser tabs. If not managed properly, you’ll lose essential bits of information, lose focus, and in extreme cases, anxiety. The built-in tab-related features and the extensions discussed above can help you reduce the clutter and organize tabs.

Do note that your experience with extensions could vary based on the version of Firefox you’re using and compatibility issues if any. If you use Firefox on multiple devices, consult our guide on using Firefox sync to keep your tabs and browsing data synchronized.