Why does Fennec (Android) keep randomly adding and then removing the tab group feature?

2 months ago by Anchorxiety to c/firefox

This is driving me up the wall. I have a bunch of tab groups but for some reason the feature keeps disappearing for me then reappearing later on.

mistermodal 10 points 2 months ago

What is your update method? Are you perhaps bouncing back and forth between a beta and a stable release from two different update sources? Happened to me when I forgot some settings in Fdroid after I switched to mostly Obtainium. Also Ironfox hasn't got this issue but it also doesn't have tab groups afaik

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Anchorxiety 2 points 2 months ago

That's the strange thing, it's not even updating. It's like some sort of A/B testing but happening several times per day which surely isn't normal. And I've got it from F-droid so no Obtainium involved.

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mistermodal 3 points 2 months ago

Weird! Can you go into the settings & root around to see where the "participate in Mozilla studies" thing is? That might be what's doing it

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trem 5 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it's happening for me, too. There's a hidden debug menu in the Fennec settings and when I enable that, there's a "Nimbus Experiments" menu where I can turn on the tab groups.

But in the tab group UI, it says "Beta". Not sure, if it also does that on official Firefox Stable.

My best guess is that Mozilla was A-B-testing tab groups on Nightly or Beta, which is why this Nimbus Experiment exist. And now their backend is getting confused by Fennec.
Maybe there's some build flag to permanently enable the tab groups, which Fennec is missing in their own build, and so the backend sees "unsigned build v153" and is really confused why that doesn't have tab groups active yet or something?

Edit: For what it's worth, I found this bug ticket for Fennec: https://gitlab.com/...

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Anchorxiety 2 points 2 months ago

Ah this explains a lot! Thanks very much

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