Stardock's new application Groupy adds tabbed browsing options to all program windows on Microsoft's Windows operating system.

When browsers such as the classic Opera browser introduced tabs, browsing changed significantly. Instead of having to run sites in individual browser windows, users now had the opportunity to run them all in a single window instead.

This improved the handling of these sites and tasks on the system. Tabs never became a thing for the majority of other programs out there however, let alone for different programs.

While there have been some third-party attempts at that, TidyTabs for Windows or Clover for Windows Explorer for instance, the functionality never managed to gain mass market appeal.

Groupy

Groupy by Stardocks might change that. Stardock released several popular Windows programs in the past, the Windows start menu replacement app Start10, or Fences, a tool to unclutter the Windows desktop. It is compatible with Windows 7 and newer versions of the operating system.

Groupy adds tabs to any program window on Windows. You can combine multiple program windows, and switch between them using tabs.

What's great about it is that it happens automatically. Move a window over another, and you have created a new group. Tabs are added automatically to the new creation, and you may switch between them in multiple ways.

You can still click on program icons that are displayed on the Windows Taskbar to do so, as creating tabbed program windows won't interfere with the display there. A click on any tab switches to it as well.

Some users may not want to create tabbed windows when they move programs on top of each other. The settings offer a solution for this. You can configure Groupy to only group program windows when the Shift-key or the Ctrl-key is held down.

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Another option that you have is to limit the grouping to individual applications. If you enable this, you may group program windows of the same application, but not of different applications.

Groupy displays tabs in a new toolbar on top of the program windows. You can switch that to displaying tabs next to the titlebar instead, but that works only if program windows don't use custom titlebars (Groupy defaults to tabs on top if that is the case).

The tabs work pretty much as browser tabs do. You can close them with a click on the x-icon to close individual tabs, and can use drag and drop operations to move them around or away from the tabbed browsing window.

Here are a couple of examples where this may be useful:

- Combine multiple Windows Explorer windows in a single window.
- Run different browsers in a single tab, for instance Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi and Firefox, or browser windows from the same browser.
- Combine different tools that you need for a task -- photo editing, writing, video cutting, development -- in a single window.

Tabs offer two main advantages over the one-window-per-program approach. First, that it may be used to combine programs in a single window that you use for a specific task. Instead of having to juggle around with multiple program windows, you access all programs that you require in a single interface. This means as well that you can run window operations on all of the programs at once, e.g. minimize all in one operation.

The second advantage goes hand in hand with the first: it improves organization.

Groupy is in beta currently. Customers of the company's Object Desktop application can get it right now.

Closing Words

Groupy is a handy tool for Windows that may improve your productivity. The handling is elegant, but with enough options to give users full control over the grouping process.