Firefox Devs Working on Tab Previews

It was useful 8 years ago when they removed it, that’s for sure.

Genuinely the only good thing about Microsoft Edge. I wish other browsers had this.

...especially when they don't bother to fix years (sometimes decades) old bugs.

It's objectively worse. Fancier but objectively worse.

Another big, distracting pop-up that has no benefit over the existing tool tip which is still distracting when it pops up unintentionally. Also the preview will use more system resources.

I can already read the title of the page and see the favicon, so it actually doesn't show new information. If I accidentally move my mouse there it covers a big part of the page i'm looking at

On top of the fact that those previews are annoying as hell as other comments pointed out, I want to add that this kind of feature also uses a fair amount of processing + memory.

I think that is a nice opt-in feature for those who wants it but I like my default light and simple.

Not OP but I’d do the same, for the simple reason that I find most overlays super distracting. It immediately triggers a need to see what’s underneath.

I think it’s more that there really isn’t a need for this. If I’m not sure what a tab is I can always click on it. Chromium got this a while back and (even with minimal exposure to Chromium) I didn’t like it, it weirdly felt annoying and unnecessary.

Tree style tabs makes this feature entirely useless.

Really? AV1 & webp support, Quantum engine, process-per-tab, reader mode, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3 support, cross-site tracking protection...?
Browsers have a lot of features. Some convenient, some come and go. That's ok.
Firefox is an ideological choice for some people so both cynicism and unconditional support is expected.

@AMDIsOurLord @linux

I am a longtime Firefox user. I absolutely love many innovative feature Firefox has implemented (such as container tabs). Firefox does so many things better than other browsers, such as allowing CTRL-clicking tabular data for copy-and-paste.

However, I’m usually annoyed by features they add that seem like they’re just doing it to be like the dominant browser.

The worst was when they reassigned CTRL+I from getting page info to match IE’s behavior of viewing favorites. Thankfully, they’ve gone back to the sane behavior.

It's a good feature, and probably makes sense to default to on. But I know I'll find it more distracting than useful, so I'll turn it off.

Large tooltips on mouseover are usually distracting. Facicons, text, and additional windows do enough to remind me what my tabs are.

New features often aren't helpful to each and every user, but as long as I can turn off the ones that are actively unhelpful to me, I'm perfectly happy to see them.

This is just a clear sign of struggling with change adaptation bruh.

Gladly Lemmy userbase is so tiny compared with FF userbase that it won't influence Mozilla decisions to not implement this at all...

And you'll probably be able to deactivate it as they say so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@SeekPie @Olifant that's the whole reason I use it

I was aware of Floorp and had no particular interest in trying it until now. On my way to install it now!

Last time I looked at Floorp was when it was first announced and it seemed to just be hardened Firefox, similar to Librewolf. It's gained a ton of features since then!

Not a fan of Edge, but absolutely love the tab groups. Use them at work all the time.

I don't know why I never vibed with vertical tabs, but I've just never been able to make it work mentally. And I could see a double-edged sword with synced workspaces (I think having a button to click and see open tabs on other devices is a perfect middle ground). Personally, tab groups is the only thing I miss from Chromium. I used the feature for grouping, but also for labeling tabs: "Check back Tuesday," or "Don't forget to follow up," or whatever. If they gave us tab groups and then never updated Firefox again, I think I would be pretty happy.

EDIT: well okay not happy, but I would be satisfied with the browser we ended up with.

This person said XUL is insecure! Any Palemoon users here? Anyone wanting to tell them that Mozilla is totally taking away user Freedom and that Palemoon is a totally secure Browser? XD

Admittedly, yes, XUL was a complete shitfest. Though I remember that it was more due to security patches and poor memory management that caused the apparent poor performance, not so much for addons. I was on waterfox classic at the time of writing of this article and had like 30 addons enabled, including TST, CRT, and TileTabs. all non-e10s-blocking, and, I assure you, it was just as fast(and slow) as quantum.

But, that's besides the point. Customization, especially via addon's, was one of the defining features of Firefox. Before, you had opera, which you could customize it within certain limits, Firefox if you want full control, and IE if you're a dummy. Now, you have Vivaldi if you want customization within certain limits, Chrome if you're a dummy, and Firefox is... just... not chrome? I'd say the addons should've been kept at all costs, maybe in a different way, without amputating the whole browser. But they did and it lost it's appeal to a major portion of people. Of course there are still exclusive features like container tabs and min vid, but those are not exclusive to quantum either. The whole ordeal sounds just like that time when Yandex, in order to solve a support ticket overflow, just removed the contact support button.

In the vast overwhelming amount of cases tooltips show additional information that you cannot see from clicking on something or provide an explanation to an option that isn't available without scrounging through a manual. None of those apply here.

So, a toggle in accessibility settings, default off?

Wait, FF doesn't have separate accessibility settings anymore?

It's a second https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6926705

Same here. And the single-key shortcuts for switching tabs. Modern browsers don't even come close.

You can get the same in firefox (mostly) with the Gesturefy addon

The extension is awkward to use imo. The way Vivaldi has it integrated for example is miles better and I really want to see Firefox do same.

Again, in my opinion you approach the problem like a power user. Using a browser is not a speedrun where every millisecond matters. Here is why I think it provides more comfort to an average user:

• No need to divert attention and look around the monitor. When you're not well versed with a mouse, it's easier to click and look at the same place
• Nothing distracts you unlike when you click through pages. Imagine going from dark theme page to a light theme page, the entire screen suddenly lights up
• Depending on the way it is implemented (perhaps by keeping compressed page screenshots?), it might be faster to show a preview than to render the page again on a weak machine

Currently have 23 tabs open, 7 are youtube, 3 lemmies, and i guess the rest are docs I cant tell I'd greatly benefit from the tab previewer

I think it's much easier to have more than to have less. Most people I encounter have such a mess of pages in their browser, makes my hair stand on end. If we continue to approach this as an accessibility feature, it starts to make even more sense since tons of users have so many tabs they only see icons, not page names

I often get myself into a position where I have 50+ tabs open, but then I get annoyed with all the damn tabs and go on a purge.. furiously clicking X on tabs down the line until I have it down to something manageable. This happens every couple of days. I wish there was a setting where one had the option of limiting themselves to x amount of tabs and if you hit the limit you know it's time for a purge. I've seen where chromium browsers also have tab groups... I'm not sure if that helps for tab hoarding, I guess it could be more organized that way, but also sounds like it just enables more tab hoarding.

@Tattorack

being chrome but slightly worse at some things and slightly better at other things certainly sounds like a winning move..

I saw that later, I guess I forgot to save the edit.

150 ms feels alright.

When the OS tells Android Firefox that the phone is running out of ram, it murders any tabs it thinks you might not be looking at, to avoid being murdered by Android for its ram.

I just replicated it by opening a second app. It doesn't seem to do it every time.

I wish it still worked well on modern sites. I used Opera from around 2000 until when they switched to Chromium in 2012ish. The first version I ever used predated the Presto engine. I used it for everything except web development (which I did using Firefox and Firebug) and sites that needed ActiveX (where I had to use IE).

These days I usually use Firefox, except I use Chrome for web development since its dev tools are a bit more responsive on complex sites compared to Firefox's.

Cool, will try that!

I still use this one:

https://github.com/dannycolin/fx-compact-mode

No I meant vertical hight. The horizontal width is way better than in Chromium, same with the "scroll tab feature" which works well better.

That second setting is beta is no longer supported so its not shown

Yeah, spoofing user agent can cause this for instance.

I did that too but it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, it's nuts

CF's captcha works by activating obscure browser features banking that bots haven't implemented them or behave just differently enough to stick out as unusual. Try creating a new profile with default settings, and if that works try adding your customizations back one by one until you find the one breaking CF.

I have no idea, but the issue has been periodically reported in FF forums at least since '22.