Wow, good thinking by the Phoenix team... who said programmers can't design good UIs? Despite a tiny bit of an inside view into UI development at Mozilla/Netscape, I just dont get it. That said, revel in the design iteration:
The Phoenix team believes the way that bookmark "groups" were created and used was too difficult a concept for most people to grasp. Bookmark groups are too valuable a tool to not make accessible to a wider audience so the Phoenix team have eliminated the bookmark group as a separate entity, and given the "group" functionality to all bookmarks folders. You can now open a folder of bookmarks into tabs with a right-click and select "Open in tabs", or simply a middle click. This has the advantages of eliminating the confusing concept of groups and folders and giving you bookmark group capability automatically and easily.
Now, I don't really agree that bookmark groups are categorically too difficult for "people" to grasp (depending on definition of people :)). Bookmark groups open a set of URLs in separate tabs with a single click. The issue is how to create them. The implementation, as an afterthought to the file bookmark dialog, was eminently hackish. It required you to duplicate the full state of tabs you wanted and necessitated a multi-step process to edit an existing set.
The new design capitalizes on user effort in organizing bookmarks. In fact, it provides a compelling reason to organize bookmarks. Even in IE users, most bookmark lists are flat. Mozilla's organize bookmark functionality is less developed.
In addition to re-using existing UI understanding in the user's heads, this change provides the functionality in an integrated way with existing features. Finally, this change addresses a UI 10 Commandment violation in the initial implementation, the lack of visibility or system status information about the contents of a bookmark group.
Bravo!
Of course, there are occasions where the ability to bookmark a group of windows all at once is a handy feature. It would be ideal to have an reimplementation of the old functionality, but with the underlying representation of a folder of 'marks.
1:13:14 AM 
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