Select Tabs by Lionel Wong

Adds a submenu of commands in the tab context menu, which appears when you right-click a tab (henceforth called the target tab).

⌨️ You can assign keyboard shortcuts to commands, giving you a keyboard-driven way to invoke them on the current tab. On the about:addons page, click the ⚙️ button → Manage Extension Shortcuts, and look for the Select Tabs section.

✂️ You can toggle individual menu commands on and off in Options/Preferences, allowing you to prune the submenu to your liking. (For example, some commands are best for keyboard use – good candidates for removal.)

Available commands are:

URL-based:

• Duplicates — Select tabs sharing the same url as the target.
• Same Site — Select all tabs sharing the same website domain and subdomain as the target. (Note for example, www.wikipedia.org and en.wikipedia.org have different subdomains and would not get selected together.)
• Same Site Cluster — Select only a group of neighbouring same site tabs around the target.
• Same Site and Descendants — Select same site tabs, and all their descendants regardless of website.

Tab tree:

• Descendants — Select the target and its descendants i.e. its child tabs, and their children, and so on. A child tab is a tab that was opened from the target.
• Parent — Select the tab that the target was opened from, if it exists.
• Parent and Descendants — Select the target's parent and all its descendants (naturally including the target). If there is no parent, select the target and its descendants.
• Siblings — Select the target and its siblings (tabs with a common parent). If the target has no parent, all parentless tabs end up selected.
• Siblings and Descendants — Select the target, its siblings, and all their descendants. If the target has no parent, all tabs end up selected.

Directional:

• To the Start — Select the target and all tabs to its left.
• To the End — Select the target and all tabs to its right.
• Add One Left — Add to the current selection a tab to its left.
• Add One Right — Add to the current selection a tab to its right.

Temporal:

• Accessed in the Past Hour — Select tabs opened or viewed in the past hour.
• Accessed in the Past 24 Hours — Select tabs opened or viewed in the past 24 hours.
• Accessed Today — Select tabs opened or viewed today (since midnight).
• Accessed Yesterday — Select tabs opened or last viewed yesterday (excludes any viewed today).

Other:

• Clear selection — Deselect all tabs that are not the current tab.
• Invert selection — Deselect selected tabs and select all other tabs.

Notes on selection behaviour

Hopefully these intricacies are sensible and intuitive such that you don't really have to think about them in regular usage.

• Selections usually exclude pinned tabs, except:
  
  1. when the target is a pinned tab
  2. with the Invert selection command, when the original selection included a pinned tab
  3. with a parent-seeking command
• Within a selection, the tab that receives focus is, in order of priority:
  
  1. the parent tab, when using a parent-seeking command
  2. the currently focused tab
  3. the target tab
  4. the leftmost selected tab

🥰 Grab "tab trees" with or without Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery, et al.

Whether you are a user of a visual "tab tree" extension or not, Select Tabs can be a lightweight companion or even an alternative for showing implicit tab relationships, via the parent/sibling/descendant commands.

Note: By default, tab relationships do not survive tabs/windows/the browser being closed. Most tab tree extensions remedy this though.


😎 Pro tips

General

• Select Tabs → Duplicates is more effective with a url cleaning extension installed, which removes unnecessary tracking parameters that would mess with duplicate-matching.
• How to manually select (and deselect) multiple tabs:
  
  • Ctrl+click (or Cmd+click) a tab to add it to (or remove it from) a selection.
  • Shift+click a tab to select all tabs between it and the current tab, inclusive.

Context menu related

• To see how many tabs are currently selected, right-click a selected tab to find certain menu items that display the count e.g. Send 10 Tabs to Device, Close 10 Tabs.
• On Windows and Linux, every Select Tabs menu item has a keyboard accelerator a.k.a. an access key, indicated by an underlined letter. For example, to access Select Tabs → To the End while the tab context menu is open, press S (more than once if other menu items also share this key) and then E.
• Can't see some of your selected tabs scatterred all over an overflowing tab bar? Gather them in one place: right-click one of them and Move Tabs → Move to Start (V S), or Move Tabs → Move to End (V E).
  
  • Alternatively Move Tabs → Move to New Window (V W), or drag them off the tab bar for the same effect.
• Select Tabs makes tab context menu items Close Multiple Tabs and Select All Tabs practically redundant. Why not get rid of them?

Keyboard related

If you like using Select Tabs via keyboard shortcuts, here are some keyboard-driven tab navigation tips:

• Ctrl+1 all the way to Ctrl+8 (or Cmd+1..8) switches to the first to eighth tab.
• Ctrl+9 switches to the last tab.
• If you've enabled "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" in your browser settings:
  
  • Ctrl+Tab to switch to the previously seen tab. If you hold down Ctrl you get thumbnails of recent tabs you can Tab through.
  • Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens the tab list menu. Unfortunately this helpful shortcut is not available without this browser setting on.
  Otherwise: Ctrl+Tab to switch to the next tab on the right, Ctrl+Shift+Tab to the previous tab on the left.
  
• Manually targeting tabs is not straightforward. Ctrl+L (or Cmd+L) or F6 to focus on the address bar, then Shift+Tab a few times until a tab receives focus. Then use Left/Right arrows to traverse the tab bar.
  
  • Another way to get focus on the tab bar is to click just above the last focusable item on a page (e.g. a link, button, input field) and then press Tab enough times until the current tab has focus.