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Firefox tab groups are here

blog.mozilla.org

271–280 of 455 posts

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#271
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 limi…

I totally understand the confusion it brought to users, but I'm equally disappointed in how quickly the idea was abandoned, especially by the broader Android app ecosystem. It would be so useful to be able to open multiple Amazon app tabs to compare products for example.

The feature is still in the OS, so apps that declare support can allow users to open multiple simultaneous windows of itself. Most native Android apps can probably add support for this feature with minimal code changes, as Android "best practices" have pushed apps towards good reactivity support and rigorous handling of app state in these types of edge cases.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#272

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…

I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need to, or individually.

When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>").

I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names.

This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks.

In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high.

About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#273
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low. I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months ago, so hard to dig back through history) I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.

Interesting, because out of all the three browser Firefox should be the best at memory management, unloading tabs along with Sessions recovery. But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact. Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for…

There is a memory problem on Firefox I only found out about a few months ago when it started happening to me after an upgrade, "ghost windows" that use memory and never get deallocated. Restarting Firefox is the only way to clear them.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#274
I've been really happy with the winger addon for managing tabs. I really am closer than ever to complete control.

(no relation, just a user)

It adds a dropdown list of windows in the tab bar in which you can name each window, move tabs between windows, and save/restore windows into bookmarks.

Now instead of having 1000 tabs in 20 odd windows and eventually declaring bankrupcy, I have 1000 tabs in 20 _named_ windows alongside 500 bookmark folders of (named!) past sessions. Much better.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to be able to use an icon instead of names - maybe it could let you select a favicon from one of the member tabs.

You can use a single emoji as a group name

Glad to hear this works. My bookmark folders are sometimes just a single emoji - takes up less space but still hints at the contents.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#276

I've not changed anything on my home setup yet, but I've been experimenting with vertical tabs and tabs groups for the past week or so. I'm not sure if vertical tabs are doing me any good, but I think Tab Groups have really been aiding my productivity. I have so many tasks I'm working on in a given day, constantly jumping between specific instances of the same site over and over. For example, on any given ticket I'm…

Saved groups are shown in the List all Tabs menu (the button on the right of tab bar)

that button is NOT there

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#278
post #144

Glad thousands of users who managed to find their feature voting site pushed Mozilla to do a few baby steps Though the current interface isn't good - mandatory group names (which also waste space in the precious tab bar by default) and inability to ungroup with a single key (due to naming conflict) - adds too much friction. Also drag&drop to group is too precise, but also can't be disable, so now you can't reliably m…

Mozilla can’t win. They implement a feature and this is one of the top comments from the community that should be its target audience,

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#279

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.

Not sure how it compares to chrome but firefox does have a solid open tab search. You can either click "list all tabs" button (down arrow to the right of the new tab button) and then "search tabs" or enter "%" as the first character in the address bar followed by your search term. As far as I know there is no keyboard shortcut for it.

They changed the official named from "address bar" to "location bar" ages ago when they added functionality like that, and to go with the new name, "ctrl + l" is a shortcut for it.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#280

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…

Personally, I find myself working on multiple tasks/projects across a day and the easiest way to decompartmentalize it all in my head is to move tabs related to a project into it's own group, that way I can click around Project A, Project B et cetera
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