Dynamically constructed tab groups

[nickcoury]

One valuable use case this proposal can address is comparisons. Often users open a number of links in new tabs to compare search results, products, or other lists. These links might be from the same site or a variety of sites.

For a host website to provide this feature with the current proposal, they would either need to provide a pre-curated bundle of links, or require the user to click checkboxes (or similar) next to each link of interest before clicking another button to open them all.

A better UX could be enabling links to target named tab groups. This would allow a site to offer an appropriate button e.g. (+ Compare) next to items of interest, and each click would add a tab to the same group. The user could interact with the tab group, close tabs that are no longer useful, and return to the original page to add new tabs as they go. This would also indirectly help users curate tab lists to share or save later.

This pattern is already common on many sites, but requires custom implementations and only works on same-site content.

This is also somewhat possible today for browsers that support a secondary action to add to a tabbed group. This would make the experience more explicit and discoverable, and allow individual sites to better tailor the experience.

The interface might look like:

<a href='site-a.com/running-shoe' target="_tabgroup" tab-group-name="my-site:query=mens+shoes" tab-group-label="Mens Shoes">Compare Running Shoe</a>
<a href='site-b.com/dress-shoe' target="_tabgroup" tab-group-name="my-site:query=mens+shoes" tab-group-label="Mens Shoes">Compare Dress Shoe</a>
<a href='site-c.com/casual-shoe' target="_tabgroup" tab-group-name="my-site:query=mens+shoes" tab-group-label="Mens Shoes">Compare Casual Shoe</a>

Clicking each link would add it to the same tab group.

Other considerations:

It might be desirable to auto-namespace to the current site, tab, or even document, so different pages or sites can't open links in the same named groups unexpectedly. Scoping to the site may still be desirable for multi-page apps where the user compares things across multiple pages or from different tabs.

This can still combine with the existing proposal, to allow "Add these 3 products to the comparison".