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Firefox tab groups are here

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#251

Post by m463 »

bityard wrote: post #213

It's worth remembering that Firefox HAD tab groups before, just under a different name and then killed it because "nobody used it": https://medium.com/@twidi/how-i-survived-the-removal-of-pano... The implementation here is a bit different, I'm sure, but the core idea is the same: Group your tabs however you like and switch between the groups at will. I use Vivaldi these days (thanks to it's excellent UI customization…

I love these "nobody used it" justifications companies sometimes proclaim.

I guess there probably are features that can be trimmed back, that go unnoticed and don't draw attention.

But sometimes I think companies refactor something and just don't want to think about supporting something. Or, they have an unpopular hidden motive.

(I think of apple's target disk mode, and tesla's non-existent dashboard and now turn signal/drive select stalks)

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#252

Post by m463 »

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…

> It seems to be super common

I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing to talk about.

Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to die"

it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and people talk about it.

Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of tabs")

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#254

Post by y33t »

bobajeff wrote: post #245
bityard wrote: post #213

It's worth remembering that Firefox HAD tab groups before, just under a different name and then killed it because "nobody used it": https://medium.com/@twidi/how-i-survived-the-removal-of-pano... The implementation here is a bit different, I'm sure, but the core idea is the same: Group your tabs however you like and switch between the groups at will. I use Vivaldi these days (thanks to it's excellent UI customization…

I'm nobody. I loved panorama. It was basically Exposé but in a browser which allowed me to keep not just tabs but 'Windows' organized visually without taking up separate tasks in my actual task manager. This new feature (which I've already gotten to test), I can almost use the same way, though I'm wary of Mozilla yanking it away from me if I rely on it.

Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs. Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in your desktop's searchbar and being taken directly to it.

At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more feasible.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#256

Post by Narushia »

Now they only need instant tab search, like Chrome does with Ctrl+Shift+A. It's like the last thing I'm personally missing before I can actually make Firefox my primary browser. Chrome's tab search is so damn good for navigating in a big tab jungle, it's one of my favorite and most used features of the browser.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#257

Post by rebelpixel »

y33t wrote: post #254
bobajeff wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm nobody. I loved panorama. It was basically Exposé but in a browser which allowed me to keep not just tabs but 'Windows' organized visually without taking up separate tasks in my actual task manager. This new feature (which I've already gotten to test), I can almost use the same way, though I'm wary of Mozilla yanking it away from me if I rely on it.

Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs. Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in…

Google Chrome had this on Android several years ago, but it was quickly yanked out—probably because people hated it as it felt like ti bogged down the OS with it. Personally, it felt like information overload forced into a limited UX context.

But now with advancements like tab unloading/discarding and faster CPUs, it might work for some people om mobile devices. Desktop browsers though might still be hampered by limited task/context-switching options.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#258

Post by colordrops »

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 use them for work. Usually I have multiple efforts going on at once, so I put jira tickets, documents, deployment tools, etc for each effort in a group.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#259

Post by Aerroon »

alabastervlog wrote: post #7
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'm not consistent about going back and closing tabs. By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more, and it's downhill from there. Some of them, I think "this is good, I'll come back to this when I get a chance" so I don't want to mass-close them. Eventually I'm opening new tabs of tabs I already have open, because it's faster than finding the original. Every now…

I operate this way, but I didn't used to bookmark them. Until one day I needed to find a website that I had not bookmarked and had closed. I even remembered where the tab was supposed to be but I had mass closed my tabs. It took a long time until I found the page again.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#260

Post by Brybry »

AbuAssar wrote: post #152

Great news, I use tab groups daily in Safari and recently in Firefox beta. In Firefox, tab groups work better with a vertical tab bar. In Safari, there is a feature that I wish comes to Firefox: that the tabs in each group act as bookmarks, i.e., they persist across browser restarts and new windows. They are always there within their group; only the tabs that are not in a group are volatile. This makes tab groups mor…

Firefox tab groups persist across browser restarts (or at least mine have for ~5 months now). I haven't had any issues with new windows yet either though I have definitely lost Firefox tabs to that issue in the past.

I agree though, Chrome does a similar implementation where tab groups act like a special class of bookmarks and it's much nicer. You have the same process where you never have to fear losing groups and you can 'hide' tab groups that you aren't actively using and they're potentially accessible from any window.

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