Safari Auto-Organize Tabs: Is anyone else finding this frustrating

[nortonandreev]

Hey everyone,

I was honestly really excited when the rumors dropped about Safari getting an AI auto-organize feature for tabs in macOS 27. It sounded like exactly what a heavy tab user needs. But now that it’s here, it feels like typical modern Apple – a great idea implemented quite poorly.

My biggest issue is the randomness of it. You’ll have a bunch of tabs open, and at some completely arbitrary moment, Safari just decides it’s time to organize them. Out of nowhere, a new group appears, tabs shuffle around, or they suddenly get hidden inside a group.

It completely ruins muscular memory. I’ll go to click a tab that I know was just there, and suddenly it’s gone, buried inside a new group somewhere else. I feel like I'm constantly chasing my tabs around the screen just to find what I was working on two seconds ago. It's an active disruption to workflow rather than a helpful feature.

Honestly, this feels like history repeating itself. A few years ago, when Apple introduced manual Tab Groups, I tried using them and ran into a nightmare. Tabs randomly disappearing, entire groups getting lost, and iCloud syncing between devices being completely unreliable. I gave up on them, tried them again a year later, found the same bugs, and never touched them again.

I have a feeling this new auto-group feature is headed for the exact same fate. I just don't understand how a company with Apple's resources can get user experience basics so wrong on their flagship browser.

Is anyone else experiencing this "tab chasing" frustration, or are you actually finding the auto-organization useful? How has the stability been for you compared to the old manual Tab Groups?

 

[01cowherd]

I wasn't keen on this feature from the start, but nobody replied yet so...

My biggest issue is the randomness of it. You’ll have a bunch of tabs open, and at some completely arbitrary moment, Safari just decides it’s time to organize them. Out of nowhere, a new group appears, tabs shuffle around, or they suddenly get hidden inside a group.

This was my main reservation about this idea. It sounded misguided, to say the least. I already use Tab Groups and Profiles, so I already keep my tabs fairly organized. But I briefly tried it on the manual setting, and I found it pretty useless as well. For example, it would group all my YouTube tabs even if they're unrelated to each other.
The new "Topics" in the Bookmarks sidebar has similar issues. It either over-specifies topics, so it has only a couple of bookmarks, or adds things unrelated to the topic. One topic is "[brand] Earbuds", but then it has items for a completely different brand.

Honestly, this feels like history repeating itself. A few years ago, when Apple introduced manual Tab Groups, I tried using them and ran into a nightmare. Tabs randomly disappearing, entire groups getting lost, and iCloud syncing between devices being completely unreliable. I gave up on them, tried them again a year later, found the same bugs, and never touched them again.

What bugs did you encounter? I find Tab Groups one of the more reliable recent features. It works much better than iCloud Tabs, which I get zombie tabs showing up every couple months.

 

[now i see it]

Just use history as your guide. When has apple auto -anything-ever worked well?

 

[nortonandreev]

One more thing I've noticed that really highlights how disruptive this feature is.

If Safari decides to auto-group tabs while I'm actively typing in a text field (for example, writing a forum post or comment), the focus seems to get interrupted. The text cursor jumps back to a previous position, so if I keep typing or paste something without noticing, it ends up inserted in the wrong place.

It's one of those issues that's easy to miss until it happens, but it's incredibly frustrating because it silently corrupts what you're writing. You think you're continuing your sentence, only to realize you've inserted text halfway through a paragraph or overwritten something unexpectedly.

That's arguably an even bigger UX oversight than the tab movement itself. A browser should never interrupt active text input just because it decided to reorganize the tab bar in the background.

Тhis is another example of the lack of attention to detail that Apple has been showing for quite some time now.