About eight years ago I got an email from an old contact at Opera who said some ex-Opera designers and developers, including Opera's cofounder, Jon von Tetzchner, were launching a new web browser. Would I like to try an early beta? I did try it, and I never used another web browser again.

I've called Vivaldi the web's best browser, and that's still true for me, but somehow it manages to keep getting better. The recently released Version 6 comes with a new method of managing tabs dubbed Workspaces.

Vivaldi already had more ways to manage tabs than every other browser put together, so even I was wondering what Workspaces were going to be good for, but they turn out to be yet another great option to tame your tab jungle.

The usefulness of Workspaces is based on the premise that you have a lot of tabs open. I know I do, but every now and then I see someone else's screen, and I'll notice they have only a couple of tabs open. God bless you, if that's you. I want to be you. But I am in the middle of researching Norse exploration of North America for a homeschool lesson, trying to expand my collection of recipes of grilled meats on skewers, reading several 18th century sailing diaries on Archive.org, ordering parts for my Jeep, writing a post for my website, and reading several articles sent by friends. All told, I have 36 tabs open in Vivaldi as I type this.

That's just in my personal profile in Vivaldi. My work profile has 67 tabs open, as I am researching a dozen products that I'm in some stage of testing and writing reviews and guides about, including this one, natch.

My tabs would be absolute chaos and mayhem were it not for Vivaldi's tab-management tools. Keeping work and personal separate is possible in any browser, but Vivaldi's tab tools include the ability to cluster tabs in groups, tile multiple tabs into a single window, and now, with Vivaldi 6, put tabs in Workspaces.

I think of Workspaces as a bit like virtual desktops on your PC—in this case they're all part of the same web browser, they're just visually cordoned off from each other. That's an important distinction, by the way. Workspaces are not fully siloed, so, for example, you can't be logged in to different Gmail accounts in different Workspaces. Hence the virtual desktop metaphor.