Mozilla Firefox is Working on a Tab Grouping Feature
Mozilla Firefox is Working on a Tab Grouping Feature
Mozilla Firefox should gear up as an excellent option for power users and productivity enthusiasts with this feature.
Multi-account containers + tab groups would make Firefox the perfect browser for me, and I wouldn't be able to use anything else.
Multi-account containers are almost indispensable for developers. As for tab groups, I am currently using an add-on to manage them, but having a native feature would be very cool.
SimpleTabGroups and the ability to place pinned addons in any area of the browser UI already gives you that
I need tiling as well. But even without that, Firefox is my daily driver.
A better frontend for about:profiles would be great as well.
It's about tf time.
19 plugin authors looking for a new project now
Finally. Have made the switch over to Firefox a few months ago and this almost made me switch back. I swap context a lot at work / home so being able to group (and minimize said group) tabs helps a lot.
The Multi-Account Containers extension is great for this. Each container keeps its own context, so you can be logged in to the same service twice (or more) in tabs in one window. Can set it up so that some sites will always use a certain container, or that sites in a container will always use a proxy. That is EXTREMELY useful to me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
Helpful, but not what I'm looking for personally. I want to be logged into the same account, just have groups of tabs related to different tasks I'm working on. Could be documentation for various frameworks or tooling related to whichever language I'm working on. Chrome had this and it worked great.
They said nothing about that functionality, but yes it is nice for a completely different use case.
Unfortunately, containers only isolate cookies and session data. It doesn't isolate history, bookmarks, saved logins, etc akin to Chrome's profiles. A major use of this is separating work and personal browsing.
Firefox technically has profiles as well (via about:profiles), but there's no profile switcher separate from an internal page.
Firefox has profiles, so you can further separate your work browsing from personal browsing. Each profile acts like a separate instance with it's own history, bookmarks, addons, everything...
🎶You put the feature in, you take the feature out, you put the feature in and shake it all about. 🎶
I've been using the Panorama Tab Groups add-on for years, which (as I recall) is pretty similar to the native stuff they inexplicably removed back in the day. It's currently unmaintained and a little janky in spots but perfectly usable.
I use Simple Tab Groups personally. Been working for years. Might be overkill for some though.
Yeah I ran tab groups for years too. I finally quit because I just had too many things open but it was definitely handy.
Pretty sure this existed on desktop firefox somewhere around 2005.
It did
They should just checkout the code from 2005 and copy paste it in.
I never really found a use for this. Do people really need so many tabs open they have to sort them?
I look up a lot of things and sometimes one page doesn't fully answer it so you need to do extra research, then you end up 40 tabs deep in the history of it and it all ties back to each other.
Also programming, that also requires a crap load of tabs.
I think I have five browser containers across three devices with dozens of tabs on each. I don't sort them. Autocomplete from the omnibox usually gives an option to jump to the tab I need.
I usually always have between 20 and 40 tabs open, but I’ve seen a few people in forums complaining that some add-ons would crash because those individuals had hundreds or even over a thousand tabs open simultaneously.
It may be a little niche, but I’d bet plenty of people will use it. I’m in the middle of a personal research project, and it would make things so much easier for me. I’m currently grouping my tabs by having multiple windows open…
I mentioned it in my reply to this comment, but Simple Tab Groups is a pretty solid alternative in Firefox.
Its not quite as elegant as the built-in Chrome ones, but it does make it easy to have a bunch of groups sorted out that you can flip between.
For work, ya I've found it useful. Personally, at home no.
Different people have different ways of working. Some people are accustomed to having a million tabs open, others can’t stand it.
My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don't work that well for me. I'm a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that's private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn't fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren't visual, don't stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can't think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can't always think of the right keywords to set).
So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it's something unimportant where I've just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.
It's not ideal but it's the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren't properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I'm still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he's also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn't meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.
I have two windows in my main profile and two in a secondary profile. The main profile windows have 83 and 29 tabs open, and the secondary profile has 50 and 38 tabs.
And then more tabs in multiple windows on my tablet (sadly, Firefox still doesn't support multiple windows on iPadOS despite the feature being introduced nearly 5 years ago and all other major browsers supporting it...At this point it's literally the only reason I don't use Firefox as my main browser) and yet more on my phone.
That said, I don't actually use tab groups very much. I currently have just 4 of them, with a total of 19 tabs in them combined.
Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.
For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my... uh... shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I'll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have 'projects' which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me... I'm not complaining, you're complaining).
At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I'm playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don't use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother's account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don't have to worry about it), and a group for my "working from home" stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I'm always editing them for work.
So all in all, I don't have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be... but honestly, that's a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I'm done with their work.
Shit I have so many tabs open. Bookmarking is essentially the same as closing them because I'll never find them when I want them let alone remember I bookmarked them. Then I'll head to a search engine to relentlessly try and remember the term I searched for in the first place but not see any visited links or the visited links were the non-helpful sites and the one I want is gone.
After all that I'll just give up and some weeks later find the bookmark I was looking while looking for another non-related bookmark.
Yeah me neither.
ITT it kinda looks like people just leave tabs open as a way to remember where something is, or even as a way to remember that something needs their attention.
There are much better ways, but everyone needs to do their own thing I guess.
The thing about open tabs is that they are already open, I don't need to do anything to put down the note. And I'd usually need to open the site again to continue working - and often other sites as well (that are now also already open in tabs nearby). So I use them even though I kinda hate them. I just wish I could organize them easier.
Having available ram apparently is just a me-thing
No not really a need at all, just an alternative to bookmarks imo. Having more than ~ 20 tabs open is a very inefficient way to work imo.
Didn't they use to have this years ago? And then removed it?
This is a good thing, but just as a pet peave - why do people keep so many tabs open on desktop web browsers? Every new tab uses more memory. Computers were not designed to have 100s of tabs open. There is no way anyone actually actively uses 100 tabs, and I see people all the time with so many tabs you can hardly even see what is there. There is a thing called bookmarks and folders for storing commonly visited sites on a computers hard disk rather than temporary RAM...
But I do think it is good firefox is adding the capability, as grouping can be useful if done right in moderation. But it's just kind of funny the person asking for the feature admits to having huge amounts of tabs open.
At least for me, I have ADHD—if it's out of sight (i.e. another bookmark in one of the hundreds of folders I have), it ceases to exist, no matter how important or interesting it is.
I have 6 virtual desktops for current projects, with all of the tabs (and other applications) for each project on a desktop, and with a Firefox window for each "topic" within that project. I go through and close out old windows periodically (i.e. when I need to free up desktops), saving anything I might want to refer back to with the Tab Stash plugin. Importantly, I also have the Auto-Discard Tabs plugin so they aren't using RAM until I need them again.
It might seem messy, but it's what works best for my brain. I do at least try to not have more than 12 tabs per window. On rare occasions I'm even successful! 🙃
pretty sure if you don't visit a tab for a while or reopen your browser with the "keep previous tabs" setting thingy on, those tabs are not all loaded in memory. even if I have 100 tabs open, most of them take up negligible space in ram and only load in once I click on it. also I'm lazy and creating/deleting bookmarks is more work than closing/opening tabs.
I believe they do use just as much RAM as current tabs, it's just computers are better at handling it now.
Mozilla makes reference to them eating RAM, but I'm not 100% sure.
Use fewer tabs
Each tab requires Firefox to store a web page in memory. If you frequently have more than 100 tabs open, consider using a more lightweight mechanism to keep track of pages to read and things to do, such as:
Bookmarks. Hint: "Bookmark All Tabs" will bookmark a set of tabs. Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox. To-do list applications.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources
Those are my emotional support tabs, ok? yes all 22 of them.
My excuse would be ADHD, I constantly lose track of what I'm focusing on and when I do focus on something I want to explore every part of it, that means exploring every path/solution/fact etc about it, then it's a I want to have this open because I will need in the future like tomorrow or I want to explore it more later so I don't want to bookmark it because I will lose my thought process, but time goes on and I will focus on something else and the cycle repeat. I find it very hard to just close them because I keep thinking, I will need it soon but soon never comes or when it does I already closed it and now I'm blaming myself I didn't have it open. It's a silly issue to have but it's how my brain works.
I, to my daughter: "For (this and that reason), you have to reboot your laptop." Daughter: "But then I have to close the browser!!!" - she basically uses hundreds of browser tabs as temporary bookmarks, having pages open for weeks occasionally. Having to close down the browser is a panic-inducing thing for her...
Does she have ADHD by any chance? That's a very consistent bit of behavior with myself and my ADHD homies.
Try a session manager add-on. In the list view, it's easier to close the irrelevant ones, then save the important ones under a meaningful name, never to be restored - but just knowing it's there if needed brings peace to mind, at least for me.
Shut up heretic
lol
Unfortunately, the way many companies are set up these days, they require employees to use multiple different web applications to do their job. And if you're a developer, you need many different tabs for testing scenarios.
A tab may ascend to a bookmark once it has been verified good and/or useful.
Right now it is TBD, i came across it while looking at/for something and will keep going down that path, but want to take that tab page in in the future.
Swap partitions disliked this comment
Vivaldi has tab hibernation so that the extra tabs barely take any resources unless you open them.
I use over 100 tabs. Basically serves as an always changing bookmarks. Those tabs are also split across multiple workgroups between which I can switch easily with a flick of my mouse.
A wise person once told me
Unused RAM is wasted RAM
Having tab groups is not identical to using 30 tabs simultaneously.
It's more like 2D bookmark layout, group by content, group by identity (cookies and co) and all with a website screenshot. It's faster, more visual bookmarks.
Perfect timing as I just recently switched back to FF from Chrome and Safari and I freaking need this.
Me too! For now, check out Simple Tab Groups extension.
Yes, that is my main one along with TST!
i started using tree style tabs which was absolutely life changing. best computer memory i've had in years, it's a far more logical and space-friendly way to keep lots of tabs open and still be able to read the titles. i feel like specifically grouping adds too much overhead - i have to think about which group to put each into, and think (even a little bit) about where to find it later
I love the way the Tree is automatically created. Having the ability to rename the root on the occasion where it’s not intuitive, would be perfect.
Was looking for that! Yeah, tree style tabs just makes researching so much easier. It also just feels good closing a parent tab after falling very deep in a rabbit hole.
Link for firefox if anybody is asking what we are talking about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
About. Fucking. Time.
An option for an additional tab row would be nice as well. I'm not going to use the dev version to get that working (the only way to do so right now with an add-on)
Not the only way, been using the regular firefox version with multirow enabled via css mod applied.
I was led to believe that was not possible.
Surely they just integrate tab tree. I've used it for years and feel lost without it. It's a very clear way of showing relationships between tabs.
I'd rather see the kind of tab organization found in Arc browser, but let's take this a decade at a time.
Arc works perfectly for my workflow. Using Firefox since Netscape days, but arc is really good. Don’t love that it is chromium and not open, but the ux is incredible. And air traffic control is such a nice feature.
I love Arc and I won't change, probably even if they charge for it... I wish this wasn't a feature only present in a Chromium derivative because it made my job much more productive and makes the move a bit difficult.
Been waiting for this. The tab group extension didn't work well for me.
This is actually great. I hope it makes it to Firefox Android as well.
I don't actually have a use for it. But my partner is a huge tab group user on mobile, so I can't switch her off of Chrome. If this launches on Firefox Android she would probably switch. It would be great for privacy and browser diversity.
About time. Vivaldi has it for ages
pinned tabs work for me, but edge has a nice grouping feature, I hope it'd be similar to it
Firefox had tab groups in their beta 10 years ago, idk why they removed it. Was great!
So how is that different from their official addon?
It's nothing like that. The extension you linked is about maintaining separate browser histories and cookie sets, whereas what this post is about is just a new way to organize and manage tabs themselves.
Right... I use multiple browser windows as tab groups. Tried tree tabs, but since I keep one window per topic I rarely get enough tabs open to need them.
I'm still confused why people are so hell bent on using a single window exclusively. It's a natural way to group the tabs and it was there from day one!
Especially since modern desktop environments will have a gesture or something to give you a preview of all your open windows. What's annoying is that they all seem to shuffle the spatial order of the window previews whenever they feel like it.
Because there are smarter ways to group tabs than 20 browser windows.
I tried that, but eventually they just all blended so that now I've got three different windows with 50 of the same tabs open. Groups can have labels so that I can see which group is which.
That's what I do on a desktop, sure. Isn't an option on mobile though.
awesome news, i loved the tab groups back when i was using edge.
I remember the first time they ditched it, I didn't get accustomed to the feature because I knew what was coming. Around that time they acted very googley adding and removing features, luckily firefox has become less ADHD.
Instead of using tab groups, I use multiple web browsers. I find it much more logical and easier to access. Also complete separation of cookies and logins.
I use multiple user profiles in the same browser for separation of logins.
Does this mean they’ll group in chromebook?
Thank fuck. This is one of the main reasons I can't use Firefox atm, beyond the fact it's also slower than its competitors.
There are various add-ons for this on Firefox so it's never bothered me.
this is the one thing I miss from brave.
Let's have tab rows back first, shall we? Reverting to CSS that you break every damn release is just stupid.
Boo.
Remember when Firefox was a lightweight stripped-down browser and you simply added features that you wanted via extensions?
Me to, me to.
If you want to use Netscape all you need to do is download it...