Mozilla Firefox is Working on a Tab Grouping Feature
3 years ago by dantheclamman to c/firefox
But now I will be able to have tabs within groups within windows within desktops!
Fascinating. This is the part I absolutely don't get about this. Plus windows create a better visual boundary for the context-switch tab groups are supposed to be as you minimize one and restore another.
Why not just use windows? 🤷 I sure hope they keep the implementation of this simple and end up just doing that for the user. Create new tab group -> color-coded new window opens up, gently nudging the user towards how simple the solution to their problem actually is.
Tab groups in chrome are something I dearly miss from chrome. It’s super convenient for grouping projects and quickly switching between them. Multiple windows is a worse experience: there’s no preview favicon or anything to indicate what a window is actually for until you hover over it. With a tab I can see at a glance what something is before I switch.
Every instance of the same program eats memory
This reminds me that I once "accidentally" closed about half of those windows - each ~200 tabs - of my then GF. Took her over a month to notice. Tells you all about how useful tab hoarding actually is.
I don't have enough time in the day or week or month or year to do everything I want to, so I keep my tabs open until I chip away at them one at a time. It takes a long time, but it doesn't mean that the tabs aren't useful to me and won't remain useful months later.
That's me with YouTube videos, sometimes I would see a video on recommended that interests me but don't have time to watch it immediately, I have to open it on a new tab otherwise I would never find it again. Sometimes it takes me days to find the time to watch it.
Cuz then I'll have thousands of bookmarks like I already have now
A handy to when it comes to closing tabs: mouse wheel down anywhere on the tab label closed the tab, no need to find the little 'x'.
Related: mouse wheel down on a link opens that link in a new tab.
I have one tab per email account. A few for github issues I’m waiting to be fixed. One which is some random search I just use as reminder. None of which I have closed in months. I literally have a script to boot them up on my second monitor everytime I boot my pc.
Achutucally Opera had it first, back before it ditched Presto.
I remember those days. I was so sad when it went away.
IIRC the old tab groups feature was eventually removed because telemetry showed that only very few people used it...
Right, but then you shouldn't be shocked to find out that a feature was removed because nobody seemed to be using it.
No, I expect Mozilla to know their market and use other means (like focus groups or surveys or something) to figure out which features are actually popular, instead of lazily using a bad metric.
I used Panorama a lot. Was sad when it went away
Fucking took them long enough
I hope Firefox implements a great and robust tab grouping feature. Because they used to have one that worked beautifully.
Firefox used to have Panorama view, which was a way to group tabs with a nice visual interface. ...and they removed it because not enough people were using it.
...Well if you stopped removing useful and perfectly functional features, maybe you wouldn't need to rebuild them later when it turns out people do want that feature, huh, Mozilla?
There's an extension that reimplements Panorama and it kinda sorta works like it used to.
Oh that's pretty neat Is there a way to make panorama view not hide tabs ?
I use Tile Tabs WE for something similar
https://addons.mozilla.org/...
Took a while to get the hang of it, creating layouts and such
Thank Christ.
Can they also be synced container tabs Mozilla? As in synced across devices. I know there's a container tabs add on you can get, but it doesn't sync from my laptop to my desktop to my phone. Would be awesome if they did so natively.
While you're at it, could you add tree style tabs natively in Firefox? Pretty please, with cream on top.
Container tabs do sync in recent versions of firefox
But Android has far more users than FF.
I just use power tabs. gives me vertical, grouping, search, sorting, and some rules behaviour you can do but I don't use that last part.
Yeah of course, but that's why all browsers - AFAIK - allow you to open new windows not just new tabs. This naturally groups tabs into contexts. In other words, this very feature is implemented already.
But in a new window i don't have the 10-20 pinned tabs that I jump to very often, having tab groups helps in this regard.
I have my Firefox browser set to clear history, cookie and site data on exit. I never use probably more than 15 at a time. More than 10 is very rare. I don't get people that keep dozens of tabs open. I just you know browse back to what i was looking for. Seems much faster than searching through tons of tabs.
Multiple projects that each spawn ten plus tabs. Why in the hell would i want to "remember" some obscure stack overflow link when i can use simple tab groups to keep it there?
And bookmarking something so temporary is also wasteful. Tab groups are a lifesaver IMO.
Finally, someone who uses their browser like me! I keep my Firefox the same, and with containers, I still stay logged in, but don’t have to worry about cookies being left over.
Like you, I’ve never understood how people can handle having 10+ tabs open at once. I have my YouTube tab always up and ready to go, and the rest of the time it is a tab to search, open the link in new tab, and so on and so on. It gives me anxiety looking at the mess that some people have on their browsers! It’s the equivalent of having your entire desktop filled with shortcuts and folders!
Don’t get me wrong, I know more than my normal 5 tabs can be needed at times, I’ll put my own reasons below. But every single day? Closing the browser and having it load more than 5-10 tabs again every single time? No wonder people complain about Firefox being slow, their browsing habits cause it! 😂
The most tabs I’ve ever had open was only to download multiple mods off of nexus that looked cool back before they made Collections a god send. Now I don’t have to do that any more. 😁
Wow, thanks. Yeah, I was surprised to see the comments saying the way we browse is abnormal lol.. Maybe it's just how our brain works but I know for me, I am hyper focused on what I am doing in that moment and my thoughts are always shifting but keeping my browser only with what I am actively using is just something I've always done. For example, right now this is the only tab I have open. :). I need to utilize containers more... Really, what I want is something that would open containers automatically for specified sites and not have to choose manually to open in.
Cheers and thanks for the comment.
You can set containers to open every time you go to the website!
For example, I have a YouTube container, and every time I open YouTube, it opens in the container even if it was in a Nexus Mods container or anything like that. Once you have a website in view that you want to always open in a specific container, you can click at the very right side of the address/search bar, and it is an icon just like the containers icon. It says Always Open in or something like that. I hope that helps you streamline your containers! 😁
@LucidNightmare @mynamesnotrick When I read about different browsers and they spend half the article talking about tab groups and tab islands and tab this and tab that, my eyes glaze over. I do not understand how it's that big a deal. Maybe I'm not a "power user."
I love having features, that’s fine with me, but when their biggest “draws” are the tabs thing, then I am with you. Like, okay? How is the extension support? What does their privacy features look like? What does it do that makes my browsing more pleasant? Oh, just tabs tabs and more tabs…? Next!
Firefox is open source and not chromium tho. Using Chromium still helps Google push their standard as the web standard. Firefox and Safari are the only two pillars standing up against Chromium we have now.
Vivaldi is pretty cool... Although most features I don't need. I have a hard time breaking up with Firefox.
I was using Vivaldi as my living room TV PC browser because it was kind of a one stop shop.
Eventually I found plugins and mods for Firefox that did only what I need.
RSS feed sounds pretty amazing. What site can it read?
Just use Tree Style Tab
It's interesting, but it wastes to much of the screen.
True, sadly I'm unable to stop using tree style tabs after getting accustomed to it years ago. It's one of those rabbit holes I'm unable to climb out of, similar to modern keyboard layouts.
Don't be sad. I'd say you're doing it right! Vertical space is much more limited than horizontal on 21st century monitors, and tabs are wide, not tall. Tree tab UI enables semantic layout (showing you practically unlimited levels of nesting), plus they always give you consistent room to read page titles. Why should the usability of tabs decrease as you open more of them?
Absolutely this, there isn't anything currently from what I've found that gives the easy experience that Chrome/Edge has.
Only thing that I've been missing when I moved from Edge, apart from PWA support.
powertabs will give you vertical, grouping, search, sorting, and some rules behaviour
I would say its superior. You can create and add tabs to groups. expand and collapse them. make rules for certain sites to auto open in a group you made. sort based on url or name or last used. rename them. move the groups around visually. I do use it with the vertical tab view and tend to ignore the top bar though so it may depend on your usage.
I'm away from my PC so I can't name it but there's another plugin similar to Tree Style Tabs. The creator claims that TST takes up a lot of resources. I do notice Firefox taking a lot of CPU/mem but that's probably my fault. I've tried both and either works well.
Might be talking about Sidebery. I like them both and switch back and forth
I recently started using simple tab groups and like it. I just wish there was a way to keep my tabs in groups sync'd across devices. So if I open or close a tab in a group on my desktop, when I go to my laptop that group would be updated with the changes. It doesn't seem to work that way currently, at least when I tested it out.
Tab Stash. Don't need nor will ever need anything else.
Fact that they survive shutdowns because they can live and travel in your bookmarks is a great feature. I use Nextcloud Bookmarks and not FF Sync and they work great.
I've been using Ungoogled Chromium at work just for the tab grouping. I'll gladly use Firefox 100% if this is as good.
This is what has been keeping me on chromium for my study partition. I would love to use Firefox, but I need to group tabs by class. Once Firefox implements this I'll be able to drop google products completely.
I'm using FF tab groups and Sideberry, other than the occasional link getting opened in the wrong group I haven't had issues. I really need to test Chrome and it's profiles to see what the fuss is all about :D
Again?
This is exciting - after the demise of Panorama I used Quicksavers Tab Groups plugin, then when that died I moved to Simple Tab Groups, which to me is a good enough clone of Panorama. But something more modern would be super nice.
I might finally be able to switch to FF! Yay!
It is not just one feature that makes the browser better. When you switch, you have to take the good with the bad.
This is absolutely THE feature that has kept me away from FF for a long, long time. I like most other stuff about it, but tab groups are a necessity for me. I exclusively use browsers with Tab Groups and Tab Stacking
It's already a feature available as an addon
The UX sucks. Look at Vivaldi and Arc for good UX.
Maybe I never learned how to properly use grouping in Vivaldi, but I concluded that Simple tab groups extension is better for my use case. In Vivaldi it seemed too simple to accidentally open new tab in another group. With STG extension I am always locked in 1 group and do not even see tabs from other groups.
At that point, why wouldn't you just have separate windows. It's not that different in terms of usage except navigation.
You could check out Sidebery (Firefox addon) (A note: I use it with Floorp, a fork of Firefox built around user control. Floorp link)
Ton of features and very nuanced customization (you can change pretty much all minutia of its UI, which is a huge plus over other stuff I used). Some noteworthy features I like:
Vertical tab bar with collapsible parent/child tabs
Tab Grouping, which seems to be functionally the same as workspaces
Unload or refresh tabs or groups en masse easily
Customizable new tab buttons. ie: you can have "new tab", "new private (or other container) tab", and "new lemmy.world tab" all at once.
Customizable movement of tabs to specific Tab Groups based on domain and/or container. ie: I have a "Media" tab group, and I set it up so any domain from youtube.com or dropout.tv automatically get moved from other tab groups over to "Media"
There's more, but those are the points that I find the most useful.
Sideberry is great! I discovered it recently after quite a long time of not being satisfied with tree style tab.
I appreciate that it works with Firefox sync.
Btw thanks for the tip about media. That sounds really convenient.
This might do it for you. Not exactly workspaces, but sessions https://addons.mozilla.org/...
Found it! Thank you!
I forgot this was a thing. That was awesome.
How about they actually make Firefox restore multiple windows for those with dual monitors? Shit crashes? Say goodbye to an ENTIRE monitor worth of Firefox when it restarts. Will it be the left monitor? Right monitor? Who fucking knows! You'll be able to reopen your tabs on ONE of the sessions!
I have dual monitors and when this happens I go to history, restore window and get my session back. Have you tried this?
You'll only get 1 window worth of stuff back. Every time. It's a known bug, and is currently filed in their bug tracker. Pinned tabs get lost, second-monitor windows get lost, etc.
And yes, I fully know about History -> Restore Window.
https://support.mozilla.org/zu/questions/1065131 -- here's someone complaining about it from 2015...
I hope it's optional. I dislike it in both the taskbar and browsers. I sometimes open the same source from different origins and I'd not be pleased if they come grouped together.
I just use several windows on several virtual desktops. It's much less cluttered.
Those hacks are needed because windows can't handle many things at once.
Finally!
Chrome's only had this for like four years
You are one of the blessed minimalist ones. I feel most users are drowning in tabs.
I have 1408 tabs open.
I use Tab Manager Plus to make sense of it all
Can't wait until we can use a locally running AI to search inside the tab contents and group tabs by content topic, because TMP can only search tab titles!
You might as well close the tabs and use a search engine at that point right? I honestly dont understand the workflow here
But I found the content ... I don't want to have to search again. Also google is becoming terribler by the day And I want to search that stuff locally, in my browser, I want to search the content of the tabs from my browser. From a single tab and only the subset of my tabs, not the whole internet.
It's like having your books on the table, open on the right page. And putting them back on the shelves, and then searching for which books to search. When we have a functionally infinite lenght table (well, about 2000 active tabs is about the limit for my 64gb system)
If it's at the point you need a tab manager, surely you could just use bookmarks.
I have never recovered a tab from a bookmark, except for the few on my bookmarks toolbar
Bookmarks manager doesn't even store the tab's contents, it's search is quite terrible anyway.
For me, the bookmarks manager is a trashcan with folders containing 10s of thousands of tabs and no real ability to search it
What is the memory usage like?
Near 40gb, I'm running about 50 addons, using tons of containers and strict isolation.
Are you... slurring your words?
Default feature about 1% of userbase use, the seventh.
I mean, why not just make it an addon?
Because webextension addons are shit for things like this. Accept that it might have features that real people who aren’t you actually use and enjoy life. Or go use SeaMonkey and live like it’s 1999.
And Firefox had built in tab groups already, for years. The feature was hidden, then they removed them and said “nobody uses this, use an add on” and the addons have always performed worse than when it was built in.
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@lemmy.ml
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A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox.
Rules
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3. Communicate in a civil manner
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Finally. Now my thousands of tabs will be hidden behind hundreds of tabs groups!
save