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Firefox tab groups are here

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#51

Post by catapart »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I do project work, which generally requires dozens of tabs, sometimes across multiple browsers, depending up on the project (usually a browser-based software project).

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#52

Post by dkarl »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I mostly use tab groups to keep and hide the context for a task I'm going to return to later. For a given task I might have design docs, Jira tickets, meeting notes, technical documentation, and a dashboard open. I can group all of those into a tab group, collapse it, and then they're out of sight, out of mind until I return to that task.

I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.

Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a collection of current documentation and historical context for a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around. Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab groups I've kept for over a year.

I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't important.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#53

Post by pawelduda »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36
canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…

And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out these are rookie numbers.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#54

Post by hollerith »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I don't get it.

To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2 minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or hindered.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#55

Post by kristopolous »

alanbernstein wrote: post #22
canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

Mainly because the interfaces for tabs, bookmarks, and history are all quite disparate instead of being unified like they should be. None of them are good , but the interface for tabs is more manageable.

Also search in the history should also involve the content of the cache and not just the page title.

This is such an obvious one.

It might have been an unreasonable request in 1995 when these concepts were coming into form but maybe we can move on...

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#56

Post by radicality »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #36
canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

> computational costs are close to zero

Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#58

Post by 3D30497420 »

reginald78 wrote: post #30
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #5

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

It is particularly bizarre to me that the tab bar is horizontal on browsers. We switched to wide screen monitors close to 20 years ago, then stubbornly continued to waste vertical real estate for UI elements. Then webpages all went hard on mobile oriented designs and literally throw away the extra horizontal space by forcing portrait layouts. Yet we still use horizontal bars that make it hard to display tab titles an…

I do a decent amount of front-end work, so I'll have a browser and code editor side-by side on a 29in monitor. In this situation, I very much prefer horizontal tabs. So that's one use case.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#59

Post by lurk2 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #26
canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

My impression is that the history for web browsers is excellent and it's usually pretty easy to find things, even in cases where I looked at maybe 100 images and have to actually look at the pages and not just the titles. I think though there are a lot of people who don't know the history is there, or don't use it, or don't psychologically want to accept that it exists or something. I wish browsers had better APIs to…

The problem with Firefox is that the history feature doesn’t store duplicate entries. If you go to google.com on 2025-04-28, it creates an entry reflecting that:

ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 google.com - 2025-04-28 10:30 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

If you go to google.com again the next day, it just reorders the list:

google.com - 2025-04-29 11:30 ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

This can make it hard to reconstruct groupings of tabs from the history alone if two or more groups shared a given link. It’s not an issue for most users, but it is the reason some users prefer to hoard tabs.

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